THE ALIEN CREATURE RAKES through the confines of my mind, gently but resolutely. It is seeing me. It is studying me to the very core of my genetic code. The tips of its legs strum on threads of memory, a rhythmic twitching within my brain matter. It shuffles through the history of my heredity, the origins of my nation, what brought both me and the name Jan Hus to the cosmos. The feeling is not entirely unpleasant. Together, we see Hus, a man of God whose name is engraved upon my ship. He preaches the words of John Wycliffe from a small cathedra in the public square of Univerzita Karlova. God’s people, he says, are made up of his common children, all pre-elected to be saved—they are not the visibly identified members of the Catholic Church. God’s favor can be neither bought into nor spoken from the lips of a golden-plated old man. The organization of religion is self-defeating, a trap for sin. Hus does not speak with hatred, but with the soothing composure of a prophet—a man who knows. And the people listen. Students gather with quills in hand and their hearts are moved. Bohemia must be freed from the tyranny of religious institutions.
The image changes. The creature has gotten hold of something else. It sees me falling.
I often try to forget the date, but the creature’s cerebral strumming has brought it to the center of my consciousness—March 26, the spring following the Velvet Revolution. I am ten years old. That morning, my parents take the cable car from their Austrian hotel in the Alps to Mount Hoher Dachstein. This vacation is to provide them with much-needed alone time before my father’s trial for the role he took on as a ranking member of the Party, namely the torture of suspects during interrogations. My parents risk adding to the charges by violating the court order to stay in the country, but my father says that marriage should not be subject to the whims of judicial systems. As my parents enjoy the view of the Alps and, I assume, pretend that the virginal mountaintops can distract them from the dread of punishment ahead, I spend time in Středa with my grandparents. Grandpa takes me to the garden and we pick a basketful of sour apples, and some strawberries. I eat four apples, wash them down with a sip of cola, and finish with creamed strawberries for dessert. I collect spiders from the space underneath the rabbit coop and throw them to the vicious chickens, watch as they peck the arachnids apart leg by leg. Nobody wants to speak with me about the future. No one wants to tell me what will be done to my father, why my mother does not sleep and why her forehead sweat reeks of wine, when we can stop watching every news segment on every station as if the anchor’s hand could reach out at any moment and grab one of us by the throat. There is no space for my questions.
On the Monday my parents are to return, Grandpa takes the early train to Prague with me and walks me to school. All day I fantasize about the Austrian chocolates and fancy salamis my parents will bring back.
I wait in the school lobby, next to the doorman’s booth, for my parents to pick me up. At four o’clock, Mrs. Škopková approaches me, hands folded behind her back, lips pale. In a quiet voice, she tells me that there has been an accident. My parents cannot, presently, pick me up. When will they come? I ask. Mrs. Škopková apologizes to me, and I ask why, and she asks whether I need something. My grandfather will send a taxi to recover me. I’d like some chocolate, I say.
She puts on her coat. Ten minutes later, she is back with a Milka bar in her hand. The label shows the picture of the purple Milka cow grazing in a pasture in front of the Alpine mountains. Mrs. Škopková apologizes again. The cable car collapsed, she says before she leaves. Your parents… The doorman glances at me over his crossword puzzle.
The driver picking me up is an old man who smells of pancakes. His hands shake as he drives. He makes the two-hour trip to Středa, turning the radio volume up when I ask what he knows about a cable car falling down a mountain in the Alps. My grandfather awaits us in front of the gate. He gives the old man money and takes my suitcase. In my hand, I hold an empty chocolate wrapper. Grandpa’s gray whiskers reach to his lips. The skin sinks deeply into his cheeks, and his eyes are barely open. Inside the house, Grandma drinks slivovitz and smokes cigarettes at the table. I have never seen her smoke before. Šíma sleeps underneath her legs, wags his tail lightly when he sees me, but then again closes his eyes and exhales shallow breaths, like he knows this is no time for pleasure. Grandma kisses me on the lips. I go to the couch and lie down and their voices reach me through the rhythm of that damned clock, always nagging, asserting itself harshly over the tranquility of smoke.
My grandparents take turns explaining. Earlier that morning, my parents boarded the cable car to get to the top of Mount Hoher Dachstein. I stare at the ceiling and remember my father’s enthusiastic lectures on the workings of cable cars. Aerial tramway ropes are made of dozens of individual steel strings with hemp running through the middle. I imagine my father’s lips moving behind the tram glass, re-explaining this to my mother as she admires the albino behemoths ahead, nearly lost in the morning mist. Somewhere down the line, a string pops. And another. And another. The tram is suspended in midair as Earth’s physics race to catch up. In my imagining of the event, influenced by watching Laurel and Hardy every night before the evening news, the car falls very slowly, and the bodies slide back and forth as they grab on to each other, until they are forced into a dying waltz, ladies and gentlemen locked arm in arm, exclaiming vintage expressions like “Oh dear” and “I never.” But this serenity of initial suspension—this antigravity waltz—is interrupted as the falling car gains speed. A gentleman accidentally touches a woman’s midriff, and she slaps him across the cheek with a leather glove. The car wobbles and its occupants hold on to each other’s ties and skirts, pulling off pants and wigs, the slapstick shenanigans of the silent film era. I’m not sure how these cast members die, whether their bones burst through their flesh, whether they die on impact, spines and skulls thrown over the sharp edges of black rock.
We occupy the living room, and Grandma sings a song I have not heard before about a young man leaving a hop farm to court a girl in the big city, winning her in the end by brewing miraculous beer made from hops his mother packed for the journey. Grandpa smokes, sucks from a warm bottle, coughs. Šíma whines for some food. I hold the Milka wrapper. Grandma speaks to me, but I cannot unseal my dry lips, cannot recall the sounds of our alphabet. I’m looking for my parents in all this snow. The ceiling cracks along the corners and a daddy longlegs crawls out.
Two days pass, and I move only to urinate in the chamber pot Grandma has left next to the couch. I hear Šíma lapping from it when nobody’s looking. Grandma tries to feed me, but I can’t open my mouth. She wets my lips with water. Grandpa rubs my feet and my hands with his callused fingers, stained yellow. I hold the Milka wrapper. When my grandparents go to sleep, they pull a blanket over me and Šíma snores at my feet, his whiskers wet with urine. This makes me love him more. Grandpa stays up late to watch football and all the American movies the privatized channels can now show. He knows I watch from the corner of my eye, a brief distraction from my search for the bodies, and I angle my head to get a better look at the man in a fedora who whispers to the beautiful blonde. The glow around her hair, her refusal to look the man in the eyes, gives it away—she has a secret. Their lip movements do not match the Czech words they speak. Neighbors come by every day to speak of condolences and God, but Grandma keeps them at the doorstep and thanks them quietly. He was such a good boy, they say of my father. They don’t say he was a good man. I hold the Milka wrapper and I imagine standing among these Austrian mountains as frost causes phlegm to drip from my nose and sting my upper lip. My fingers are black and dead. The world is too vast and there are so many places where humans perish quietly. What good am I, a thin purse of brittle bones and spoiling meat? I can’t find my parents. On the fourth day, I smell like the couch, a mix of dog, detergent, and spilled coffee. My calves cramp and my stomach feels disemboweled. Grandma wears a black dress and blush on her cheeks. Her lips will not cease trembling to the rhythm of her shiny cross earrings. She does not like God but she loves the cross. Grandpa stands over me in a black suit jacket and slacks, a shocking variation on his usual wardrobe of muddy overalls and old army jackets. He holds a plate filled with rotisserie chicken, bread, and butter.
“You need to get up and eat,” he says.
My eyes are with the ceiling cracks, and my fingers are outstretched, wishing to peel back the layers of plaster. My right leg cramps. I grit my teeth and ignore it.
“You don’t have to go to the funeral, but you have to eat,” he says.
“They found the bodies?” I ask.
“We never lost them. It took a while to get them here from Austria. I want you to think about whether you want to come with us. Nobody will be upset if you don’t.”
My search for the bodies was pointless, then. He grants me a few minutes of silence, then forces my mouth open and shoves a piece of chicken inside. He takes the Milka wrapper from my hand and throws it inside the cold chamber of the stove. I chew, and the salt and flesh feel so good they make my eyes water.
“You have to get up now,” Grandpa says. “You have to be a person.”
I resist, reject. The creature loses the thread of my life, and we return before Jan Hus. King Wenceslas no longer protects him—Hus has officially been declared a heretic by the church, a stigma as permanent as a birthmark. The Romans now consider Bohemia a nation of heretics. Hus wears a simple white robe and climbs atop a spotted, undernourished horse. Sigismund, king of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian crown, has promised Hus a safe passage and lodgings if he attends a council of church leaders to explain his betrayal. Does Hus sense treachery ahead? It is hard to tell, for his eyes are always set forward, as if he sees wonders beyond reality, as if he can penetrate dimensions and pick at concealed truths. Hus arrives at Konstanz and lives, unharmed, in the house of a widow. Her long, dark hair reaches to her knees and her shoulders sink from the disappointment of dead love. She never looks Hus in the eyes, yet speaks to him sternly, as if addressing a misbehaving little boy. She makes thin vegetable soup for him, and Jan soaks his bread crust in it, careful not to soil his beard. He tells the widow that no earthly group can provide true salvation. His faith will not be prescribed or dictated. The books he loves and hates will not be burned. His nation will not be blacklisted on account of greed. Against orders from his hosts, Hus preaches in Konstanz—his conviction is a compulsion not subject to self-preservation. The widow kisses him before he is imprisoned. The men condemning him set a sign on his head: Heresiarch. Leader of heretics.
Seventy-three days he spends in a castle dungeon, his arms and legs chained, eating bread gray with mold. When he is questioned, the councilmen spit and ask him to recant, but he will not. A man is free, he shoots back. Man is free under God.
The sentence is death.
The executioners have a hard time scaling up the fire—simply put, Hus’s body hesitates to burn. In an attempt to help, an old woman from the audience throws a handful of brushwood on the pile, blows a little at the impotent flames. “Sancta simplicitas!” Hus cries out from the stake as his feet redden. Holy Simplicity. At forty-four degrees Celsius, the proteins within the series of cells known as Jan Hus begin to break down. As the temperature rises, the initial layers of skin peel back like those of a kielbasa. The thicker dermal layer shrinks and splits, and a yellow fatty paste leaks out and burns with a low squeal. Muscles become dry and contract. Bone burns stubbornly, though, as if the solid foundation of man were not the soul (nowhere to be seen), but this brittle framework. Here is Jan Hus, and he is dead. A space shuttle will someday carry his name.
The creature has ahold of me once again. I am on the couch; my grandparents are dressed for a funeral. I hold the plate my grandfather has given me, and I eat the chicken and dip bread in the grease, then wet my fingers and pick at the crumbs.
“I’ll stay here,” I say.
Grandpa takes the plate away and picks me up. He squeezes so hard I can feel the food moving through my body. He puts me down on my feet, and Grandma kisses me with lips tasting of lard and alcohol.
The silence in the living room changes during the hours of their absence. I am alone. Šíma is in the yard, sniffing out mice. The clock ticks obediently, mechanical and dead. The steel strings pop one by one and the tram halts suspended in the air for one long second before it begins to fall. I turn the TV on, six o’clock news. Small business grows, the communists are long gone, and we are free to live as we like. Free to travel, free to kiss, free to remain silent as the tram falls down and down until we are free to die. Free to be as we like. My grandparents come home at seven and I sit in the same chair, and I don’t remember how I got here, and I don’t know what I plan to do next—until suddenly I am no longer the sole inhabitant of JanHus1, and I am left sweating and looking upon my visitor.
“Sancta simplicitas!” the creature says. “You are what I’m looking for.”